


L.I.E. Revisited

by Talullah



Category: L.I.E. (2001)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-14 04:11:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2177415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talullah/pseuds/Talullah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Never return to where you were once happy...</p>
            </blockquote>





	L.I.E. Revisited

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to synnerxx for the beta. All remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> [Disclaimer/Blanket Statement](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Talullah/profile)

_On the Long Island Expressway there are lanes going east, lanes going west, and lanes going straight to hell._

 

Never return to where you were once happy, they say. Howard leaned forward placing his elbows on the handrail of the airway over L.I.E., where years before he had spent so much time contemplating the big gaping void of his suburban teenage life.

The bile threatened to rise in his throat and pour over the cars below, but he swallowed the knot of remembered misery down. Perhaps later he would spit it out into a poem, one that also mentioned just why you should never go back to where you were once miserable.

The cars whooshed below, their lights becoming more evident as the sky darkened. The purely physical part of Howard told him it was getting cool, that Jack and his sweater waited for him in the car; he was barely aware of those thoughts, though. Jack would be impotent against this overwhelming flood of memory.

A red Toyota tried a brusque swerve to overtake a grey sedan by the right.

'Stupid,' Howard thought. That's how people died. That's how his mom had died, plunging his life into darkness. The grey sedan's driver sensibly let the jerk overtake him, but for a minute, a rush of adrenaline coursed through Howard and he was again Howie, lonely, lost, painfully vulnerable. In the stupidest impulse of his last ten years, Howie climbed to stand on the handrail and almost toppled over. With the fool's fortune, Howard fell back into the airway instead of forward into the L.I.E., thinking that it would have been the ultimate irony losing his life to that bitch below, now that he had finally had something to live for.

He rested still on the dirty pavement. Bubble gum, cigarette butts, dog crap, empty cans and a few broken bottles, some Frito Lay bags, a couple of condoms and the odd syringe. That's what he had spotted in his walk to the middle of the airway. His Ralph Lauren polo could handle that, or if not, he could afford a new one off the very generous advancement on his next book. All that mattered was that in the midst of the orange glow above he could see Venus and the first stars. He hadn't taken the time to gaze at the stars in a while. Big John would not have approved of that.

Big John. Howard sat up and searched for the book that had fallen from his hand onto the filth. His book, his first poetry book. And in the cover page, after the pompous preface by a failed poet turned critic, it could be read, 'To Jack'. It was almost a lie. It was for Jack, but the person who had incessantly been on his mind was Big John. All his life, from age fifteen on, had been moulded by weight of Big John's stare.

Howard did not think it was strictly necessary to go down the memory lane, but there it was, his shock, upon listening of Big John's senseless death on the local radio at a diner, his mouth filling with sand and fear. Disoriented, panicked. His mom was dead, his dad in jail, and the only person who cared for him was gone too. He was fifteen, fifteen! He ran to the toilet and knelt by the closest loo, vomiting until there was only dry heaving and bitterness.

What could he do? Live on the streets, turn tricks like Gary? He didn't want to go to a foster home where he could be bullied or worse, actually grow to like the people only to lose them after.

"Now, now," he heard the amused rumble of Big John's voice in his head. "Turn tricks? You know you don't have it in you. You can do so much better. Think! You're fifteen. That's three years away from college, where you belong. You just have to endure an institution or a home - it won't kill you."

The voice faded and Howie got up from his knees and went to the sink to wash his mouth and his face. He had not realized he had cried. He looked into the mirror, knowing he had briefly hallucinated, not witnessed anything remotely supernatural.

Howie understood that he could chose more than misery. He turned himself in to a social assistant who took him to an institution as bleak as he had imagined it. He withstood it. He survived, kept in mind the sense of solidity, stability that Big John had emanated in life. His mother's death had set him adrift. Big John's had given him a new course.

Howard was lucky; he was been placed with a decent foster family, a rare couple with no kids of their own and with a genuine desire to help. Big John had been right: though far from easy, the three years' wait for college had not been an ordeal. In his new school, he was not the 'faggot' to be bullied. He had tried his luck with girls, even though now and then his gut clenched when he saw a particular boy who looked just like Gary. Again, Big John had been right - girls were ball breakers. But he liked them and they were safe. He didn't want to be cast adrift so soon again and he was not sure how a gay foster son would sit with Spencer, his foster dad.

His good grades got him a national merit scholarship, a full ride to California State University, as far away of Long Island as he could go without flying to Hawaii. Howard smiled. College, dazzling and confusing as it was, had been his first taste of happiness since his mother's death. There had been friends, a boyfriend, opportunities... Instead of going for a Ph.D. as his professors expected him to, he had spent his time freelancing as a journalist, and at the tender age of 23, he had signed the contract for his first book, a provocative analysis of road kill factors.

That's when Howard had met Jack, who waited for him in the car, probably bored to tears, while he lay in the dirt, thinking on what had been. Howard rose, dusted his trousers, smiled. Jack was his North now, his editor, his best friend, his lover. No one could be more. He took the book, cast a last glance at the stars, then at the lights below.

"Thanks," he said, the strangeness of his voice embarrassing him. "Thank you, Big John. Thank you, mom," he insisted.

He opened the book and tore out the first page, letting it fly in the night breeze. Then the second followed and the third, and the following until he held an empty shell in his hand. He threw it down, watching as it sunk in spirals, almost hitting a truck before meeting the pavement.

He looked around, at the absurdness of a thirtyish man standing on an empty airway in the night.

He was done here. No more poems about the doubt and the pain of adolescence and self-discovery. No more elegies to the older, kinder, wiser man. No more L.I.E: in every shadow of his life. He turned his back to the view of hurried lights and walked back to his car, to Jack, to what lay ahead and not behind.

 

_Finis  
June 2008_


End file.
